The following morning the auxiliary party left to return to the coast, along with one man suffering from frostbitten feet. The rest of the expedition made camp on the spot for two days while the sledges, which had been severely damaged, were repaired. Several had to be abandoned and three catamarans were fashioned out of green spruce and alders to replace them. At night the noise of ice cracking under the force of running water further up the river shook and echoed like artillery fire.
On January 31, five men including Buchan went through the ice and were soaked to the waist in the freezing current. A camp was struck and the men stripped off their clothes beside a fire while Peyton and Rowsell went forward to reconnoitre for the following day’s travel. They crossed the river a mile above the camp and Peyton was climbing a tree to observe conditions beyond a point of land when the ice began to seethe like the skin of an animal infested with lice. It lifted and settled and seemed then to move in several directions at once.
Rowsell said, “Mr. Peyton, sir.”
The ice was moving quickly in a honeycomb of large pans. They had to recross the river or risk being cut off from the party and its supplies. Several inches of water ran overtop from the river above and they soaked their feet as they ran. The pans gathered and separated in an unpredictable rush and the two men who had started out one behind the other were soon several hundred feet apart. They shouted to one another as they continued picking a way towards the far shore, the sound of their voices running between them like a cable they clung to until they’d gained solid ground.
By the time Peyton crawled up off the ice, Rowsell was out of sight around a slight bend in the river and he moved in that direction as quickly as he could in his wet boots. He found the corporal sitting on the riverbank, staring across at the opposite shore.
“Are you all right, Rowsell?”
The man looked up at him, his eyes hooded by the large brow of his forehead. “You’ll pardon me for speaking freely,” he said.
Peyton nodded.
Rowsell shook his head. “What a bastard country you live in, sir.”
The ice had moved them more than half a mile down the river while they crossed and left them only several hundred yards to walk to reach the camp where they sat wrapped in blankets beside the fire while their pants and boots dried over the heat. The force of pent-up water bursting through the ice had flooded the shore on both sides of the river, and the sledges which had been pulled up onto a bed of alders close to the bank were nearly washed away before the marines hauled them to safety further in the woods. Some of the expedition’s bread was ruined with wet in the process. The catamarans they had built were by this time battered to the point of uselessness and it became clear that not enough supplies could be hauled into the lake for the entire party. Buchan decided that a midshipman and thirteen marines, including two men who had developed badly frostbitten feet, would turn back to the coast the following day with packs of supplies to get them there.
Late that evening he found Cassie sitting apart beside one of the fires built up in the camp. She had wrapped her back and her head in a blanket and had thrown open her coat at the front to let the heat of the fire reach her body. He stood over her.
“I’m sending a small party back to Ship Cove in the morning. I think it would be best if you joined them.”
Cassie motioned to indicate he could sit with her if he wished. “I prefer to stay with Mary.”
“These are not conditions for a woman —”
“Have I slowed you down, Captain?”
Buchan said, “There is likely to be worse than this ahead of us.”
Cassie nodded slowly and stared into the fire. “I have endured worse than this,” she said.
Buchan felt a heavy turning inside him, as if his heart was shifting, settling into an unfamiliar position. He said, “I had no idea about the child, Cassie.”
“I wasn’t speaking about the child,” she told him. And then she said, “I will stay with Mary.”
He nodded a moment and then sat still. He said, “You were not the only woman.”
She looked at him.
“Since I’ve been married,” he said. He stared directly into the fire. “There have been others.”
“A navy man, Captain. Surely your wife could have expected as much.”
“Perhaps,” he said. There was a harsh note of ridicule in Cassie’s voice, but he ignored it and went on. “Early on, perhaps she might have. But it seems I am very convincing. Over the years she has learned to think better of me.” Buchan looked up into the darkness over the fire. “I’ve almost lost her twice now. In childbirth. Her constitution has become very delicate. I’m not sure how well she would survive knowing me for who I am.”
Cassie said, “Men should be what they seem.”
Buchan nodded and smiled briefly. He said, “I lost two marines on the Red Indian’s lake, I’m sure you know.”
“I’ve heard the story.” She shrugged. She seemed too tired to maintain her animosity.
“I’ve started to dream about them recently. About their bodies on the ice.” Buchan shook his head. “A friend warned me at the time that regret would find me eventually. I didn’t believe him.” He turned and waited until Cassie was looking directly at him. “I wanted to say —”